> Hello all,
>
> Sorry to interrupt you, but my reason for sending my comment to the
> message originally sent to the KAME mailing list to current-users was not to
> bring up a big discussion about binary snapshots and cross-compiling,
> but rather to request information and ideas for how external developers
> (e.g. the KAME project) can track NetBSD-current in the least painful
> way, while keeping focussed on developing their own software.
>
> - Erik
Actually, you're getting exactly what you wanted, even if it doesn't look
that way.
As many of us have discovered lately, tracking -current is much harder in
practice than in theory. Either we have to restrict the ability of core to
make deep improvements by changing things in ways that don't Just Work
the next time you SUP sources and rebuild, or we have to do one of two
things:
1. build an infrastructure of volunteers to ensure that regular
snapshots get made of all the active ports.
2. develop robust cross-building technology so that a release
machine can be used to build everything for a -current one.
#1 has the shortest time-to-benefit, but #2 is the most leverageable and it
pretty much depends on committing to EGCS (once a problem, now almost a non
issue). I am going to keep pushing in this direction whenever I have sources
that work :) and free time to work on them :(
BTW I do have an "uber" makefile that walks you through the steps that are
usually necessary to rebuild all of -current from source. When the source
snapshot is in good shape, it rebuilds a kernel, tells you to reboot and run
it again, and then it chugs for a while and drops a set of tarballs and boot
floppy images in an output directory. Long log files are saved in other
output directories for perusal when the inevitable errors occur. I will put
it up for FTP as ftp://ftp.toddpw.org/current-trackers/Makefile after I've
gotten some sleep.
Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com